Carpets and harvests

I moved into my new house yesterday and am currently having new carpets fitted, which got me wondering about the origins of the word carpet.

Carpet has been traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kerp- (to pluck, gather, harvest) via the Old French carpite (heavy decorated cloth), the Middle Latin carpita (thick woolen cloth) the past participle of the Latin carpere (to card, pluck).

*kerp- is also the root of the English word harvest, the Greek καρπός (karpos – fruit, grain, produce, harvest, children, poetry [fruit of the mind], profit); and the Irish ciorraigh (to cut, hack, maim).

Michael – there’s an interesting post on the word divan on languagehat – it seems its origins have been traced back to the Sumerian dub (tablet, letter) and the Old Persian vahanam (house), via Turkish, Persian and Akkadian.

So are ‘carp’ the fish and the verb ‘to complain’ and ‘carpal’ as in related to the wrist related etymologically to ‘carpet’ then?
Declan – I don’t know about the German ‘Teppich’ but it looks similar to French ‘tapis’ and ‘tapisserie’ – tapestry?

Tapestry is a variant of tapissery, from the Middle French tapisserie (tapestry), from tapisser (to cover with heavy fabric), from tapis (heavy fabric), from Old French tapiz, from Vulgar Latin *tappetium, from Byzantine Greek tapetion, from a classical Greek diminutive of τάπης (tápes – tapestry, heavy fabric) probably from an Iranian source (cf. Persian taftan, tabidan [to turn, twist]).

The German Teppich from the same root as tapestry via the Latin tapete (carpet, tapestry).

In Japanese, 疊 tatami means a type of mat. When I first encountered 折疊 oritatami, I parsed it as “folding mat”, which sounded odd to me because the word was used to mean an umbrella.

Later, I learned that the verb 畳む tatamu means “fold up, shut up, finish”. Oritatami really means approximately “thing which folds up to be put away”, and as a type of umbrella, means the kind that folds up really small.

(The general word for umbrella, for the curious, is 傘 kasa. Oritatami is also used to describe other things, so I’ve also seen oritatami kasa to specifically mean a folding umbrella.)

I imagine also the expensive silken fabric ‘taffeta’ is related to ‘tapis’ etc. ultimately from this Iranian source ‘taftan’?
In Welsh we have:
carp – noun ‘a rag’ or ‘clout’
carpiog – adj. ‘ragged’, ‘tattered’
carpio/carpu – verb ‘to tear to shreds’
Carpet is ‘carped’ and a ‘clout’ by the way is an old British dialect term for a rag or cloth.

In Spanish a “carpeta” is a folder (for papers). The dictionary of the Real Academia gives “Del fr. ‘carpette’, tapete, y este del ingl. ‘carpet'” as the origin — but I can’t quite see how a floor-covering turned into a document-carrier!